I have been a Christian for probably 20 years. In 1987 I read something that caused me to reexamine what I believe in, and looking at it, I came to the conclusion expressed in Daniel 5:25, where I too read the writing on the wall: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin*: "you have been judged and found wanting."

The reason came from a short passage - two paragraphs - in a speech where, at one point the writer examines Christianity and explains why it is wrong.

First, for those who are not Christians I need to explain the primary axioms of Christianity. Most people who have been exposed to western religion are aware of the myth of Adam and Eve. God put them in the Garden of Eden and allowed them to eat from any tree in the garden except the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. That tree they must not eat from or they will become able to think, "and on that day you shall surely die."** A serpent talks and convinces Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and to tell Adam he can do so. They do and are caught by god, and they and all their descendants are contaminated with "Original Sin" for violating god's orders.

Realize that under the Christian religion everyone who is descended from Adam and Eve are guilty of the same sin which was committed by someone else before they were born, and so, supposedly, all have to be punished with death. But, Christianity offers an escape clause with Jesus Christ. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever would believe in the Son would not perish, but have eternal life." (John, 3:16). So by believing in Jesus this gets you off the hook for what Adam and Eve did.

But like most Christians I didn't know the Bible that well and hadn't thought of it. But someone else had. And she pointed out why it was wrong

"The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

"A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither
good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

"Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is. like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free."

At this I realized the author of the above had actually under-represented how bad it is.Original Sin doesn't condemn me for a crime I committed before I was born, it condemns me for a crime committed by someone else before I was born. And the only way I could know about it was for someone to tell me, and I would have to accept that I could be guilty of some crime - if it even was a crime - committed without my knowledge or consent, by someone else, thousands of years before I was born.

I realized I could not accept this, and I became a non-believer in Christianity.

The quote I gave above is from a character named John Galt in a book named "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.